Beach House.
There was once a while when I lived on the beach and left the northeastern existence I’d previously known behind.
I had broken my leg. I couldn’t move without an overly wrought series of crutched contortions. It was strange to crawl to the tub. The most busted ballerino off the Bowery.
The dreaded daily rehabilitation went from stationary bike, to elliptical, to treadmill, to roasting Floridian road. It took two years to turn a shaky fractured metal pole into a standard shank.
Beyond the workouts, I thought a simple life was the kind of life worth living. Gravelly greetings in the unrelenting sun. Chat about pelicans, rotting planks, alligators, flat beer, sad television. Watch the white cars with white spoilers carouse and weave across the roadways. Tattoos of tweety bird dancing in moonlight. Sunburned faces line the fences slowly consumed by sand dunes. Bar stools where tourist and townie grumble at one another about mystical bingo strategies. See without feeling, sleep without seeing. Always with an aloha.
You might not believe the ornery representation I’m drawing with my scoff-pen. I’m mostly trying to say that I’ve escaped some timid realities that weren’t worth living.
Timid realities are what we’re told to strive for, the good life to secure. (This. Is. Wrong.)
Beach House — the band — lives within a vortex of beach-like bands. Yet they almost exist within this medium to push against the seams. Layering soft thrusts of gentle profundity, as if they were spies, secretly shoving us, looking out for the best interest of all humankind, with undulating organs, somnolent guitars, drums crushed within a pocket-driven groove. And an endless supply of melodies from a fictional 1950’s that’s actually happening now.
Struggling for more, against the very nature of their own name. This is good. This is beyond good — Beach House is sick.